It’s not that I am a youngster shunning it for snapchat or tiktok etc., but I have come to realize that I basically stopped using email, other than as a (bad) 2fa solution and notification service (and the odd mailing list).
Even at work it has become basically a pure notification service for the internal platform and a place to send the odd document or request to a 3rd party…
I realize that I am probably living in a bubble in that regard, but I actually recently met people reasonably tech affine who claimed they don’t even have an email address?!
So for a while I have been thinking of just configuring an one-way email to XMPP forwarding service (with auto-response) and be done with email ;)
How do you feel about email? Is it still important for your daily communication?
Edit: So a few days later I guess the summary is:
- Many people still use it for work / unversity (only);
- Some people still really use it a lot, but mainly as a “since everything else sucks even more” option;
- Quite a few (but probably still a minority) are like me and effectively stopped using email.
Yes that is what I meant with “notifications”. I still have that a lot too, but that could be easily replaced with something else or forwarded to another service.
While this is all true, email’s universality is a feature that no other service gets close to. It’s like English: it’s messy and there are better alternatives, but none of them have the same sort of crucial momentum.